OpenAI has recruited two high-profile figures as it prepares for a public listing: Noam Shazeer, a foundational mind behind modern generative AI, and Dean Ball, a former White House artificial intelligence policy official.
Shazeer, who co-leads Google’s Gemini project and founded the AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure from Google on Wednesday, according to a report by TechCrunch on the matter. He co-authored the landmark 2017 paper ‘Attention Is All You Need’, which introduced the Transformer architecture that underpins today’s large language models. Google had rehired Shazeer two years ago in a $2.7 billion deal that brought his startup’s technology in-house. His move to OpenAI continues a wave of talent swapping among the top AI labs.
Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 to lead a new team called Strategic Futures. “I am pleased and honoured to announce that … I’ll be joining OpenAI,” he wrote on X on Thursday. In a blog post, he said the small team would report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon and focus on “catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labour market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments … and society.”
Ball served briefly in the Trump White House last year, where he helped draft America’s AI Action Plan before rejoining the techno-libertarian think tank Foundation for American Innovation. He noted in his post that internal governance will be “more central to the future of AI than most people realise,” suggesting the Strategic Futures team will shape both external policy and OpenAI’s own decision-making.
The hires come as OpenAI’s chief rival Anthropic faces fresh government pressure. Late last week, US President Donald Trump ordered an export ban on Anthropic’s latest models, forcing the firm to take them down. Ball’s appointment signals OpenAI’s effort to secure its insider status while navigating an increasingly politicised regulatory landscape.
